Media Watch: The Sun’s ‘zombie Miliband’ game proves it’s not a serious newspaper

By portraying the Labour party as flesh-eating zombies, the Sun has crossed the line into active campaiging

Another day, another stroke of ‘genius’ from the Sun. We knew the paper’s election website was anti-Labour propaganda of the most patronising kind, replete with games and bright colours. But now ‘Britain’s best-selling paper’ is encouraging readers to throw things at members of parliament – but only in virtual reality, of course.

Sun Nation has posted a computer game portraying Ed Miliband and the Labour shadow cabinet as flesh-eating zombies.

The ‘game’ is called The Walking Ed (get it?) and involves lobbing bacon sandwiches at Labour MPs to keep them at bay, and so prevent the ‘nightmare’ of them entering Downing Street.

Now. This is quite amusing. But I would say that asking your readers to view elected politicians as deranged cannibals is in poor taste. If anyone connected with one of the parties was found to be doing this, I imagine there would be trouble.

As it is, the game is shoved online by a newspaper owned by Rupert Murdoch, a businessman known to be supporting the Tories, who’s god-daughter is close friends with the PM. So that’s fine.

At any event, when you’ve finished playing the game (yes you were), feel free to reflect on what’s happening to British politics.

On a day when the Institute of Fiscal Studies has said the worst spending cuts under a Tory government are yet to come – cuts that will likely affect Sun readers – the paper has produced a computer game about Ed Miliband.

By portraying the Labour party as zombies, the Sun has crossed the line from partisan coverage into active campaigning, and reminded us of why it’s not a serious newspaper.

Cole

jack

The sun are paying google ads money for their sunnation website to appear in the rankings with no adverts on the website Idon’t see how this could be commercialy viable unless of couse it was setup with the intention of trying to get people to vote conservative.

Leon Wolfeson

Dave Stewart

Surely there is an argument that this is active campaigning and would fall under the recently passed “gagging law” which has been used so successfully from stopping the likes of Oxfam from talking about the governments record in office.